Name: Jeffery Renard Allen

Illinois Connection

Allen was born and raised in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Biographical and Professional Information

Jeffery Renard Allen is a poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. Raised on the south side of Chicago, he now lives in New York and teaches at Queens College and in the writing program at the New School.

Published Works

Harbors and Spirits, Moyer Bell, 1999

Rails Under My Back, Harvest Books, 2000

Stellar Places, Asphodel Press, 2007

Holding Pattern, Graywolf Press, 2008

Song of the Shank, Graywolf Press, 2014

Selected Titles At Your Library

In a story that transcends time, "one image holding the family together is that of the railroad--the railroad that carries the Jones men off to war and back again, that carries their parents from the South to the North, from living quarters to workplace, from one form of bondage or freedom to another."--Jacket.

Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works-in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings.

"In 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere, inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots, who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother."--Page 4 of cover.

Awards

Rails Under My Back

Heartland Prize for Fiction, Chicago Tribune

Holding Pattern

Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence

Other Awards:

Whiting Writer's Award

Chicago Public Library's Twenty-first Century Award

Pioneering Achievements in Fiction, African American Literature and Culture Association

Charles Angoff Award for Fiction, The Literary Review, 2003

Special citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation